Interacting brain systems for learning and memory

Much of human cognition is compositional in nature: higher order, complex representations are formed by (rule-governed) combination of more primitive representations. On the one hand, our memories are stored as associations between the different components of single experiences (episodic memory) and generalised across them by the process of consolidation (semantic memory). Such consolidation involves systems-level interactions, most importantly between the hippocampus and surrounding structures, which takes part in the initial encoding of memory, and the neocortex, which supports long-term storage of facts and statistical regularities about the world. This dichotomy parallels the interaction of the hippocampus and inferior frontal brain areas in artificial language learning. Crucially, these studies highlight interesting analogies between language acquisition, semantic memory and memory consolidation, and suggest possible common neural mechanisms across a wide range of cognitive domains. In the present talk I‘ll give some examples of my recent work investigating these interacting brain systems during knowledge acquisition.